The Virtual-Reality App That Turns Your Office Into a Vacation Paradise

Mure VR, an Icelandic startup, hopes to cure the workplace doldrums using the power of fake nature.

COURTESY BREAKROOM

The British writer Charles Lamb was no stranger to workplace-induced despair. In 1792, to make ends meet, he took a job as a bookkeeper at the East India Company, a position that he would hold for the next three decades. Looking back after retirement, Lamb wrote, “No prospect of emancipation presented itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul.” Writers have long shared the sense that the aesthetic shortcomings of the office somehow mirror the disappointments of the professional world. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” published in 1853, famously starts in a room that looks out onto a blackened brick wall. Richard Yates’s novel “Revolutionary Road,” from 1961, describes a midtown Manhattan office as “a great silent insectarium.” Scientists, meanwhile, have found that open-office workers rank worst in health and job satisfaction, that a windowless office elicits more anxiety than a sun-filled one, and that proximity to potted plants boosts employees’ productivity and decreases the amount of sick leave they take. Short of turning the insectarium into a conservatory, though, how can we make our workplaces more appealing?

Mure VR, a tech startup based in Reykjavík, is one of a few companies hoping to answer that question using virtual reality. The firm’s C.E.O., Diðrik Steinsson, envisions a future in which office workers escape the glare of cost-saving fluorescents and the distractions of colleagues’ chatter by donning headsets and sealing themselves off inside virtual realms. Big I.T. companies, he pointed out to me recently, have begun building rest areas and gardens into their campuses, in recognition of their employees’ need for what psychologists call fascination—the cognitive renewal that comes from looking at organic patterns, such as a river’s churning currents or leaves against sky. “Our idea is that you could actually just sit at your desk and you could get this feeling, this psychological restoration, without having to leave the workstation,” Steinsson said. The company’s app, which is called Breakroom, allows users to perform their usual tasks while immersed in a computer-rendered world of their choosing. They might do data entry while standing on the virtual banks of Japan’s Tokachi River, say, or edit a memo while aboard a space station overlooking a supernova.

I first tried a prototype of Breakroom last year, at Mure’s headquarters, east of downtown Reykjavík. When I arrived, it was immediately clear that Steinsson and his team see the value of a better workplace in their own lives: though small, the company’s one-room office has pitched ceilings, a skylight, and a green shag carpet. (Since then, according to Steinsson, they have upgraded to an even better space, with wide views of Mt. Esja.) Employees leave their shoes by the door. Steinsson himself, who wore a gray hoodie and jeans, installed me at a workstation and handed me an HTC Vive headset. A moment later, I was in a cartoonishly prismatic ice cave with a luminous fire pit in the distance and an Excel spreadsheet hovering up close. It was a curious experience, like being transported into the background photo on someone’s computer desktop, but, given that Breakroom was in an early stage of development, there wasn’t too much to see.

In a second, more recent test, I stayed within Breakroom’s worlds for nearly an hour. The app’s Japanese garden was particularly inviting, with its rain-slicked stone path, a main hall surrounded by latticed railings, and a crop of maple trees in the distance obscured by fog. Toggling over to Bora Bora led to more good things—a tranquil beach beneath a toothpaste-blue sky, a palm tree extending up above, its underside lit orange-gold with pseudo-sunlight. Breakroom is still in development, and Mure has some problems to resolve: the app crashed several times as I began adding browser windows, and the edges of leaves and other intricate details shimmered and convulsed during any head movements. The effect was subtle but enough to distract. Over all, though, Breakroom seemed to offer just enough escape. Even though strangers talked and laughed near me in the real world, their words felt irrelevant—the way a dinner party’s hubbub might seem to a child playing alone upstairs.

When Steinsson and his colleagues set out to develop Breakroom, they consulted with Pall Jakob Lindal, an environmental psychologist who studies people’s reactions to both real and virtual worlds. Lindal’s task was to help Mure insure that users would feel ensconced, but not overwhelmed, by the app’s locations. Much of his advice drew on attention-restoration theory, the same idea that Steinsson cited. For instance, Lindal told Breakroom’s developers that “increasing urban architectural diversity” was desirable: gazing at façades full of details—like the shoji panels and latticework of the dwelling in Breakroom’s Japanese garden—is more restorative than looking at minimalist surfaces. And of course greenery, he said, is another important feature. (Clare Cooper Marcus, the author of “Therapeutic Landscapes: An Evidence-Based Approach to Designing Healing Gardens and Restorative Outdoor Spaces,” has found that the optimal ratio of vegetation to hardscape is about seven to three.)

The app’s design aligns well with other theorists’ work, too. The Swedish behavioral scientist Roger Ulrich, for example, who studies the effects of hospital architecture on medical outcomes, has suggested that the most relaxing environments are ones that people feel protect them from the sorts of primal threats that Homo sapiens evolved to avoid. Such settings, like the autumnal lake environment in Breakroom, might have ample vegetation (evidence of food and water). Or, like the app’s glacier world, they offer clear lines of sight (good for spotting predators). Other researchers have assessed environments according to their “affordances”—the range of potential behaviors that they seem to allow. In a study published in 2015 in the journal Environment and Behavior, subjects judged a room to be more spacious when the positioning of its chairs and cabinets appeared to invite visitors to sit down and open drawers. The same room seemed smaller when the furnishings were rearranged so that they couldn’t be used. Notably, the results in real-world rooms were similar to those in computer-rendered simulations.

Kerry L. Marsh, one of the authors of that study, has yet to try Breakroom or any of its competitors. But the app’s possible benefits, she speculated, could extend beyond its putatively restorative nature. Marsh suggested that users, by choosing their virtual surroundings, might gain a positive sense of territorial control, or that they might come to associate a particular V.R. location with better productivity. Still, she underscored the fact that apps like Breakroom risk exhausting users with “subtle perceptual delays.” Slow frame-refresh rates, for example, are known to worsen V.R. sickness. Marsh’s co-author, Benjamin Meagher, noted other possible limitations. “We know that people dislike and even feel stressed in environments where their behaviors are limited in some way,” he told me in an e-mail. “My suspicion is that people are unlikely to feel fully relaxed, even in the most aesthetically pleasing environment, if they feel constrained.” His point underscored one of the limitations of Breakroom: ultimately, you’re still sitting at your desk.

The biggest obstacle for Breakroom and similar apps may just be the V.R. headset. It’s difficult to imagine the typical white-collar worker opting to channel Geordi La Forge in a sea of Gordon Gekkos. But workplace norms may be more malleable than they at first appear. Before eyeglass frames were invented, medieval scribes improvised ways to strap corrective lenses to their faces with ribbons and string. And, in the late nineteenth century, accountants and editors took to wearing green visors to block out the harsh glare of the era’s incandescent bulbs. As goofy and odd as these accessories must have once looked, they soon became symbols of conservatism itself. So much so that, in the nineteen-nineties, the conservative philanthropist Michael S. Joyce warned his fellow right-wingers against putting on “their green eyeshades” and fixating on ledgers. Otherwise, he chided, “we do begin to sound like crabby, small-souled bookkeepers.”

Dawn Chan has written about culture and technology for such publications as the New York Times and Artforum. Previously, she worked as an artificial-intelligence researcher.